PAPER CONFINES.
35. / A First Anniversary

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       If anyone heard her, they didn't answer.

The end of the world left her with a sore writing wrist and more questions from Tom than she cared to riposte, but he rarely sought her thoughts if it wasn't for practice, and this wasn't her first unanswered prayer. Amoret wouldn't call her perseverance optimism more than she would say it was simply all she knew.

It was a dangerous balancing act trying to sparse her energy in all the places she needed it. On Sundays, she nodded vaguely along to Tom's healing studies, a reasonably terrible teacher. Mondays and Thursdays she dedicated to writing Nadya and Colette in what—without Myrtle's light—she was now calling the margin, which left Tuesdays and Fridays to recover from the walk. Wednesday was garden-heavy but herbivicus duo and charmed sprinklers kept the greenhouse healthy through the week, and by the end of October, Amoret predicted she'd never have to touch porridge again.

On Saturdays she visited the hospital wing with Tom. She didn't know if it was better or worse that Myrtle's health was ostensibly unchanging, but she saw the thinness shaping her uniform, sunken on the bed in places it had once fit.

Amoret had no choice but to keep her medically frozen so she wouldn't starve. She'd tried to think of a magical alternative to a feeding tube—which she was certifiably not equipped to implant, and couldn't get close enough to if she wanted to—but all she could conceive was controlling Myrtle's body through the Imperius curse to force digestion. It seemed too complex. Tom appeared repulsed at the prospect.

Finally, in late September, Amoret cast the spell and had Tom inject Myrtle with Dreamless Sleep to assure nightmares wouldn't plague her.

Checking on Myrtle in the weeks that followed exhausted Amoret more than journeys to the margin or days weeding the garden. Sometimes she'd meander elsewhere in pauses of study and hear the call of the meadow like her first days, and pinch herself awake to shed the voices. Sometimes, her eyes would blink shut in the hospital chair and she'd wake in her bed with a blanket draped haphazardly over her torso, well aware that not even she could sleep through being Apparated. Tom must have been carrying her.

And Tom, still not offering an answer to where he had been sleeping prior to Amoret's condition worsening, resided permanently in the dormitory beside hers. It was because, in his words: if Amoret was to succumb to the horcrux, he might have a better chance of convincing her to kill Myrtle if he was close by.

She awoke this Sunday morning to the glow of fish negotiating the deep waters of the lake, more like moonlight than sun. The days would have blurred together regardless.

"Happy anniversary," Tom said upon her sluggish entry into the common room, half-glancing up from a book.

"What?"

"It's the nineteenth of October. We've been here for a year."

Oh. She'd forgotten. Amoret froze for a moment. They'd been here a year and she'd forgotten; the sting of that knowledge took different shapes despite her best efforts not to let it. Mostly she urged her thoughts to pondering why Tom had taken it upon himself to remember.

"I hope you didn't plan a celebration," she said sourly.

He flipped a page. "Should I have?"

"No."

"Good."

The book snapped shut. A silver tea kettle poured her a cup, and a seat pushed free at the nod of Tom's head.

Amoret sat, stirred a spoonful less sugar than he took, and hummed as the dry static of the invigoration draught she drank each morning was washed down by warm chamomile.

"What will you teach today, I wonder," he said sardonically.

It was no secret Amoret wasn't teaching much of anything lately.

"Nothing, if you want," she replied, hardly a threat, but his expression flattened. She raised her brows over the rim of her mug. "That's what I thought."

He glowered a second more before returning to his book and letting her wake up properly.

Amoret never really woke up 'properly', but she drank her tea, ate what she prayed would be the last bowl of porridge she ever had, and stood up.

They walked together to the first greenhouse and debated which manner of magic transportation was the worst. Tom, of course, was partial to Apparation, which led to Amoret trying to taunt him over his lack of flying ability, but he was almost impossible to rile twice over the same thing. It was like he stored his every minute blunder so that he would never make them again, which—knowing Tom, he absolutely did. She eventually relented and admitted she'd rather just walk, which might have bothered him more than when she tried to.

A mental note: of course Tom was bothered that someone magical would enjoy something so muggle. She was a perpetual stab in his worldview.

The glass doors of the greenhouse rattled open with the wind, and Amoret hid her hands up her coat sleeves as a surge of cold engulfed her. It could have been the Invigoration Draught as much as it could have been the weather.

She squeezed past the nipping leaves of venomous tentacula into the second row of planters, kneeling down beside the leeks she'd planted last month. Her hands shimmied free with slightly renewed sensation and she pulled on a pair of garden gloves left discarded on the edge of a flower pot.

"Leeks," Tom observed blandly as she dug into the soil with a trowel.

"Leeks," she parroted. "They can be called dinner instead, if you mend them."

Amoret pried the soil until the roots wrenched free. She beamed even as dirt dusted her coat, and Tom crossed his arms, still standing.

His upbringing was not nearly cushy enough to be acting like this.

With a crunch, she snapped two of the leeks in half and set the others aside. Not interested in easing the process for him, she broke the stalks a good five more times and wrested Tom's hand free from his arm to dump the pieces unceremoniously into his palm.

"Go on," she said airily, but her breaths were short. Everything took so much of her. Doing anything but pushing it down wasn't an option.

Tom muttered something under his breath, and finally set aside his reservations and sat on the edge of the adjoining planter.

He toiled quietly over the leaf sheaths and stems, eyes shut as he had learned, breathing soft, white clouds into the morning cold.

Then it felt like a year. All at once Amoret was returned to the shroud of their first weeks here, the ever-present dampness that clung to the castle grounds, the fear—the meadow. She rubbed her arm over her sleeve, but the pinpricks of the rose and thorn door were nothing but scars now. The memories billowed in with the fog and fell with the leaves, and she found her gaze pinned to Tom and his silent discipline to think of something else. Frightening—that she could turn him into a way to forget instead of remember.

"How do you intend to alter this process for human cells?"

Amoret was caught when his eyes opened. "What?"

"I assume you aren't planning on running home and performing complex magical surgery on your mother without a prior test subject," Tom said expectantly.

She allowed herself a moment of contemplation before she was glaring at him. "And whoever did you have in mind?"

He tossed a nearly perfect leek into the pile and didn't answer.

"That could kill her," Amoret argued, "which you already know."

"She's already dead. I can't imagine a subject better suited to your ethics."

She pinched the bridge of her nose. "I practiced on you once, didn't I? Can we let that be enough to go one day without discussing someone's death? Please?"

"Death and time," he sighed, flicking away the second leek, "Your forbidden words. It isn't beyond my notice that they're one in the same, but I'll relent. For now."

His relenting meant nothing. He'd planted the thought in her head, which was all he wanted.

The greenhouse was warm now, or Amoret was warm, because Tom appeared unbothered, which meant it was most likely an effect of the draught. She shed her coat and collected the mended leeks, scrutinizing them under wand-light while Tom charmed the dirt off her sleeves. The stalks bore the same imperceptible fissures as all his studies did, paper-cut thin between her roaming fingers. Still, she gave him a small nod. "Better."

She didn't need to see into his head to know his thoughts reflected hers; better, yes, but not enough.

She tended the rest of the greenhouse, eager to find her potatoes and nettle were also ready for harvest. Bibi and Isoken had guided her mother's herbology proficiency, and Amoret had taken a small relic of that skill for herself. Thankfully, it was enough.

Her back ached in protest as she rose from a crouch, basket shaky in her hands. Tom sighed and took it from her. She exchanged it for her coat and did not meet his gaze; his judgement radiated off him well enough without looking it in the eyes.

There was only one can of milk powder left when they arrived at the kitchens, buried at the back of the furthest pantry under a glimmering cobweb.

Well, at least the life the horcrux stole from Amoret made for a good nightlight.

Within minutes of lighting the fireplace, the kitchens were hot and humid, stifling even with the chimney catching the smoke, and Amoret wondered how the elves could stand it or if they couldn't and just never complained.

She made Tom dice the leeks and told him not to complain while she wrestled with a lame peeler and a handful of misshapen potatoes. It was something to do, at least, menial like sorting scraps for the war effort, repetitive to the hands, and he habituated swiftly. A permissive silence took on. Amoret suspected night was falling soon, and basked in the pleasant, human simplicity of stirring a pot over a fire and watching texture take form. She dipped her pinky in the spoon when Tom wasn't looking like how Sybil always did.

Neither of them were cooks. Dinner was passable and Amoret ate it with her legs swinging from the kitchen counter.

Tom stacked her empty bowl in his and slid them spotless to the cupboard.

"The aubergines will be better," she said.

He leaned against the opposite counter, looking very doubtful with his sleeves still rolled to his elbows like some dishevelled clerical worker. "Undoubtedly."

"Thank you, Amoret, for growing food that doesn't taste like tin," she instructed.

"Not-tin is a remarkably low standard for cuisine," he countered, "I certainly hope a career in medicine doesn't fail you, you have no future as a chef."

"I certainly hope a career in terrorism fails you; you might."

"Not comedy, either."

"Well... you aren't the first person I'd ask if I were looking for help in that department."

He had nothing to say to that, and the quiet returned, steam still filtering out through the chimney. In it, Amoret heard the meadow again, but this time she was nowhere near it, and too rested to blame it on sleeplessness. She went still on the counter. There were no words to make out but the forgotten choir hum that had summoned her on her first morning, and with it something new—a vision—flashes at the back of her mind of a boy in a bedsheet, the vague shape of his beckoning beneath it. She shivered.

So the meadow was displeased at her resistance. It wanted her there, despite what it made her endure to enter. Maybe what she'd endured was precisely why it wanted her there.

"Amoret?" Tom asked, eyes inquisitive.

She straightened. "Hm?"

"You went somewhere."

"Did I?" A poor response. She wanted him to fill the silence. "Surely you're not always all here."

"Escapism serves no purpose but to grow complacent."

"I said nothing about escapism."

"Then you torment yourself needlessly."

"So I should be nowhere but here, with you? You're very greedy."

He faltered, gaze somewhere below her face. "Will you tell me about them?"

Amoret looked down at herself. In the heat of the draught and the firesmoke, coat long abandoned, her scars showed once more on her shoulders. She frowned, but pushed back the edge of her collar and held the raised skin under her palm. The bolts stretched mauve from the mirror of her heart where her father's magic struck her, up her spine in jagged spires, curled at the nape of her neck and the strap of her camisole. It was a wonder Tom hadn't seen them all summer.

"I died," she told him, quickly and without explanation.

He looked at her exactly how she expected he would. "You might elaborate."

She crossed her arms over her lap as she let her button-up hang off her shoulder. "I got sick when I was younger. It was influenza, I think—I was always sick back then. I used to like it; laying in bed all day, being read to, taken care of... I don't remember much of it. My dad was there, and I remember feeling like I was in the river, or on his boat, floating and then sinking. And everything went dark.

"I was screaming when I woke up. Actually it was like I was screaming silently in a dream, and then I realized I was awake, and making noise. The pain was so bad I felt detached from myself, like there was the pain and then there was me. I wasn't very aware of the latter. The screaming came from my body—I was just in it." She watched Tom's expression shift minutely. "I slept for a week afterwards, addled on Bibi's elixirs, and the next time I saw my back in the mirror, I had the scar. Proof of resurrection, I suppose."

His eyebrows were knitted softly together. "Magic protects against muggle sickness."

"Ah," Amoret said, clicking her tongue, "that. You said you knew of my grandmother?"

Tom nodded.

"Forcing her into hiding wasn't the only punishment she endured. But there's about a hundred stories in that one alone, so I should just tell you—"

"Tell me all of it."

Amoret reeled under the palpability of his interest. She cleared her throat. "She was a Cursebreaker after leaving Tanganyika, and brilliant at it too. It's not a Prophet-worthy career, most of the time, but she was offered something good—an operation in Egypt, hunting something of a myth. So the story goes, there was a witch-scribe centuries ago who rose above her station using magic, and gave birth to a child without. A squib. The daughter, out of resentment, sought a sphinx to steal her mother's magic, and stole from it a ritual to rip out her heart. For her thievery, the heart calcified upon leaving the body, but the daughter, regretting her mother's death, kept it like a stone all her life. Instead, her wish was perverted, and she was doomed to live forever without power—immune to sickness, disease, and death, but never with anything to live for. The ending varies on how she actually managed to die, but it doesn't really matter; the Ministry had word that the heart existed, and both of my grandparents were sent to retrieve it.

"And then it was real. Whether the tale of it was spun beyond recognition and it was created some other way, it did exist. Bibi said it was like... like touching life itself. It terrified her. It terrified my grandfather too. Their orders were to bring the heart back to Britain unaltered. She said she knew the moment she did, something was wrong. Cursebreakers break curses—but the Ministry didn't want to destroy the heart, they wanted to harness it. A noble cause, they claimed, but Bibi could feel it... the lure of something darker beneath the promise of life. The heart was ensouled. It took one look from her, and my grandfather knew too. So they ran. He never even made it to the Floo."

"But she broke the curse," Tom remarked.

"Yes, she did, and it cost her everything. She had generations of wealth and a future that promised more, but her husband was dead, she didn't know she was pregnant, and then—" Amoret laughed lightly. "—She was on posters for a while: Dangerous Witch Steals Precious Artefact, Still At Large. Actually she kept one; it's in a drawer in my dresser back home. Anyway, she was hiding in a Fidelius flat in London, and Isoken apparently found her and waited for her to eventually come out. I've no idea how long. They were friends in school and came to Britain at roughly the same time, offered different jobs so they hadn't spoken in years. Still, Isoken managed to convince my very pregnant, very rightfully paranoid grandmother that she wasn't there to assassinate or arrest her. She... helped her, through her grief and everything else."

The story was strange to recite after only telling it to Nadya and Colette, years ago. It was one to be told to her, tucked in bed, scraping together the pieces she was allowed to know until she was old enough to hear it all.

"It took seven months to break the curse. And then Isoken was as much a mother to mine as Bibi was. They raised her together. They loved each other." Amoret looked down at her lap. "Then they started getting sick."

"...The cost of the heart."

She nodded. "The Ministry stopped looking for her, and Isoken was never a suspected accomplice, but there was cholera, and influenza, and all the other easy ways muggle babies get sick... it didn't take long to realize the protection that was once there wasn't anymore. My mum never had it at all. None of us do."

"There was no vindication for a long time. The money trickled out with the war, my dad was practically disowned by his family and had none of his own to offer, but, eventually—after being offered a Ministry job, which Mum was violently disinterested in—she may or may not have used the opportunity to sneak into the Cursebreakers office and steal some very important files regarding the heart, and the truth of what my grandmother did. Then everyone wanted to turn it around, write articles about her, revere her about thirty years too late—revere my mother for the part she played in unfolding the truth. She told them to give her daughters a life where we could choose what our names would mean for ourselves, and to mind their fucking business otherwise."

"Only time I've ever heard my mum swear is when she told me that story," she added with a little smile. "You'll understand why I can't tell you exactly what my dad did—why I wouldn't even if I knew it."

Tom did not look like he saw why she didn't want to tell him.

She tilted her head, eyebrows raised. "As if you need more theories on immortality."

"That one has no casualties. You should endorse it."

"So long as it's you living forever, all your theories have casualties."

Silence again. Chimney steam and chittering white spiders lighting all fractures of the dark. The smell of homecooked soup. Calluses. Silence dispelled—the hymn of the meadow in every web, and Amoret at its centre to feed it.

Tom stepped closer. In his approach the voice was quiet again.

He crossed the gap between the two counters with steps as slow as the hand that reached for hers, leaving her every opportunity to pull back before tracing the etches of her scar. Amoret stiffened, but let him. His fingers brushed the skin offered. His eyes followed with careful consideration. It was intimate in a way less obvious than skin on skin, in a way she didn't quite understand.

"Be careful not to kill me one day," she whispered.

Tom's fingers flexed subtly on her shoulder. All the contours of his face were aglow with the dimming fire. "I thought you didn't want to speak of death."

"Indulge me."

"For what new reason, above my many others, Amoret?" he indulged.

She smiled, half-joking. "I tend to resurrect."

[ . . . ]  amoret: you CANNOT be my boyfriend if you aren't cottagecore.... / word count. 3413

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